Our
typical weekday begins around 5am. We
wake up with the sun and usually, our neighbors are already up taking baths,
washing dishes, cooking breakfast, etc.
Around 6:15, Marisa, Veronica, and Tobias all dressed in their white
shirt and black pants, join the herd of other students on their way to the
secondary school. My younger neighbors,
dressed in white shirts and maroon skirts and pants, head off to the primary
school.
Rita stays behind.
Rita’s father, supposedly living
somewhere in Nampula province, is of some relation to our neighbor,
Selemane. Rita’s father was married but
her mother was not the woman he was married to, but some other woman that he
had on the side (unfortunately a practice ridiculously common in this
country). Rita grew up with her father
and his wife, but his wife, in simple terms, refused to take care of her or
treat her as one of her own. As a
result, Rita was never enrolled in school and too often not even fed. Looking at her now, singing the latest
popular song while finishing up her chores, you wouldn’t know. She seems healthy and she seems happy now
that she’s living with her uncle (maybe?), Selemane.
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| Our neighbor, Rita |
Unfortunately, food is about the
only support she gets from my neighbor’s family. It is common for Mozambican families to hire
“empregadas” or maids, but the key word is hire. Rita is essentially their maid, working for
her keep. In addition, as a result of
being passed around the family before settling with my neighbors, Rita has
never had the opportunity to go to school.
Given that she is living with a math teacher with the equivalent of a
Masters degree and his wife who just graduated from the primary school teacher
trainer institute, I find it strange that at her age, Rita cannot read or
write. Our neighbors claimed to have
bought her a school uniform at some point but just never got around to enroll
her. Rita is now too embarassed to start
school so late and I’m not sure she would go to school if she were given the
opportunity because it would mean starting at the very beginning and her
classmates would probably be only 7 or 8 years old. Mireya started teaching her to read last year
but eventually it just became too difficult to dedicate enough time. She did make progress. Rita can now, with difficulty, recognize and
copy letters and write her name.
We’ve since started a REDES
(Raparigas em Desenvolvimento, Educação, e Saúde or Girls in Development,
Education, and Health) group with most of our female neighbors, including
Rita. We focus on income generation and
independence by teaching the girls to sew bags.
If this really were a fairytale, Rita would be some seamstress prodigy
with an eye for fashion that would land her in Milan, but it isn’t and we
struggle to get her to align the fabric and sew in a straight line… We have
some work to do, but she is learning all the same. This group has also given us more time to
observe how Rita interacts with the other women in her family, in particular,
her new “stepmother,” Paula.
Paula does not hide her dislike of
Rita well and while she doesn’t deny her food like her previous stepmother, she
can be psychologically cruel. This
became painfully obvious when Mireya and I started planning for the annual
REDES workshop.
Like the JUNTOS workshop, REDES
workshops teach the girls about leadership, health, and HIV/AIDS. Also like JUNTOS, it is an opportunity for a
bunch of girls from different cities to hang out and have fun. Mireya and I knew that we had to invite Rita
because she’d never get this kind of education or opportunity otherwise. We approached Paula for her persmission. Paula hesitated and said she’d have to talk
to Selemane as the workshop was in Monapo, Nampula and Rita would be gone for
an entire weekend. We expected this
since Rita really does do most of the housework. A few days later we asked Paula if she had
made a decision and she said she had spoken to Selemane and they were still
thinking about it. A week later, they
still had not made up their mind. We
knew at that point that she probably hadn’t spoken to Selemane but had made up
her own mind that Rita wouldn’t be allowed to travel; she just hadn’t found an
excuse that didn’t make her seem like a, well, yeah.
Fine, if she wanted to play dirty,
so could we. One afternoon, Mireya and I
went over to talk to Selemane for ourselves, since that was the excuse that
Paula was clinging to for not yet giving us an answer. We couldn’t have timed it more
perfectly. Selemane and Paula were
sitting alone in the house and Rita was washing dishes outside. We told him that the workshop was completely
paid for, that I’d be going with her along with our other adult neighbor,
Esperança, and that this would be a good opportunity for her to learn about
herself and meet other girls her age. He
agreed almost immediately as if we were idiots for even needing to ask
permission. All the while, Paula
pretended to be asleep on the mattress on the floor until Selemane asked her
opinion. Since he’d already agreed and
Paula had no REAL reasons for disagreeing, she just rolled over and said
something like “sure, yeah, whatever.”
It turns out Cinderella was going to
the ball afterall and we didn’t even need a fairy godmother to kidnap her in a
pumpkin. Don’t get me wrong, we love
Paula and 90% of the time she’s a likeable human being. It just so happens she’s not a likeable
person the rest of the time and she spends that rest of the time with Rita.
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| Our counterpart Esperanca, Veronica, and Rita at the workshop. |
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| 2013 Cabo Delgado/Nampula REDES workshop |
Rita had a blast at the workshop and
is still talking about it and singing the songs she learned, but it was no
royal ball. With its workbooks, posters,
and “read alouds,” it was full of reminders that she was the only one in the
room who could not read. During the
self-esteem session, after an entire morning of reading about business plans
and doing math for calculating revinue, her frusteration came to a head. The facilitator of the session said she was
going to throw a marker around the room, and if she threw it to you, you had to
stand up and say something good about yourself.
She started. She was smart and
loved to read and study. The first girl
she threw it to was Rita. Rita stood up
and said “I don’t go to school, I can’t read, I don’t do anything.” Not really sure what to do with that, the
facilitator threw the marker to the next person. I was a little too shocked to
say anything but luckily the counterpart for another group stood up and said,
“She forgot something. She’s
pretty.” I did some more damage control
after the session that day but it’s never been so obvious just how far we still
have to go with Rita.
Now Mireya and I are always looking
for ways to make Rita feel important. A
few weeks ago, we started talking about birthdays in our REDES meeting while we
were sewing. We’d known for a while that
Rita didn’t know how old she was let alone what day she was born so when we got
to her, we set out to give her a birthday.
First we asked if she like rainy season or cold season. She liked cold season so we told her to pick
her favorite month between May and September.
Then she picked a number between 1 and 30. We celebrated her birthday this past Sunday,
June 30th.
Most of our REDES girls came to the
party, as well as some neighborhood children, and even Brito, our JUNTOS
counterpart, showed up. We decorated our
alpendra with paper chains, put out drinks and snacks, and put on the
music. We brought out a brownie cake and
sang happy birthday first in Portuguese, then in English. In accordance with Mozambican tradition, Rita
cut HER birthday cake and fed the first bite to her most valued guest at the
party. She chose Rodasa and Suel, the
toddlers she spends most of her day caring for.
After cake, in accordance with American tradition, we made Rita open her
present, a brand new capulana Mireya and I had picked out for her. Then we played musical chairs, danced until
it got dark, and had a generally great time.
Happy Birthday, Rita!
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| Farzana, Rita, Neuza (with nephew Helio) and Eunilde playing musical chairs. Helio did not like this game. He refused to let Neuza put him down but cried every time she went to grab a chair. |
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| Rita feeding cake to her guest of honor, Suel |
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| Presents! |
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| Neuza, me, Farzana, Rita, Brito, Suel, Mireya, Paula, and Eunilde at Rita's 15th (?) birthday party. |
